Professor Antonia Darder: July 2018

Professor Darder, an international scholar, public intellectual, educator, writer, activist and artist from Loyola Marymount University will be presenting two talks at the university in July 2018. We are very pleased to announce that Professor Darder will be coming to the University of the Highlands and Islands as part of her visit to the UK, to present two talks on the 16th and 17th of July. Details for both events are as outlined below.

The Social Justice Question:  Decolonizing Pedagogy, Methodology & Leadership

Monday 16th July 2018, 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM, followed by a drinks reception. Lecture Room, An Lochran, Inverness Campus.

This talk is a public lecture, open to both university colleagues and the general public.

There is much talk internationally about providing socially just education within subaltern communities. Yet, often the practices within educational institutions perpetuate the coloniality of power and structures of inequality that fail to support decolonizing pedagogical practices. This presentation draws on the work of Brazilian philosopher and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, to consider a set of personal and political principles that can assist us to enact educational leadership approaches founded on an ethics of liberation that can promote cognitive justice and community empowerment.

Embodied Love and Emancipatory Possibilities: Examining Issues for Transforming Gender Inequalities

Tuesday 17th July 2018, 10:00 AM to 12.00 PM, followed by a networking reception. Lecture Room, An Lochran, Inverness Campus.

This talk is for university colleagues and invited guests.

The presentation will address central epistemological and relational issues within the university and society that women face in the course of their labor as intellectuals, scholars, teachers, and activists. Toward this end, issues of the body will be critically examined with respect to gender politics and efforts to transform effectively social and material conditions in meaningful and liberating ways. A critical pedagogy of love will ground this discussion of embodied praxis, which will focus on our everyday engagements with individual concerns as well as the larger societal context.

This session will be part of the inaugural meeting of the Women’s Network will take place on Tuesday from 10.00 AM and 12.00 PM followed by a networking reception. Attendance by videoconference also an option. This event is open to all colleagues from the university plus invited guests.

Professor Antonia Darder

Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership

Loyola Marymount University

Antonia Darder is a distinguished international Freirian scholar. She is a public intellectual, educator, writer, activist, and artist. She holds the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles; is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Education at University of Johannesburg; and Professor Emerita of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She also holds a Distinguished Visiting faculty post at the University of Johannesburg, in South Africa. Antonia is an American Educational Research Association Fellow and recipient of the AERA Scholars of Color Lifetime Contribution Award, as well as the Freire Social Justice Award. She has worked tirelessly for more than three decades to fiercely counter social and material inequalities at work in schools and communities.

Antonia’s scholarship has consistently focused on issues of racism, political economy, social justice, and education. Her work critically engages the contributions of Paulo Freire to our understanding of inequalities in schools and society. Darder’s critical theory of biculturalism links questions of culture, power, and pedagogy to social justice concerns in education. Through her decolonizing scholarship on ethics and moral issues, she articulates a critical theory of leadership for social justice and an interpretive methodology, with a focus on the empowerment of subaltern populations.

Antonia is the author of numerous books and articles in the field, including Culture and Power in the Classroom (20th Anniversary edition), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power, Freire and Education, and,The Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She is also co-author of After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism and co-editor of The Critical Pedagogy Reader, Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader, and the International Critical Pedagogy Reader, which was awarded the 2015 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award. Through the passion of her written and spoken word and the simple beauty of her art, her work has traveled around the world, consistently calling for economic justice, human rights, and cultural democracy for all people. In 2015, Antonia was nominated for the prestigious Brock International Prize in Education.